It is absolutely true that every piece of electronic gear or software ever made is vulnerable to viruses, trojan horses and malware of all kinds as well as direct attacks using techniques to exploit flaws in that system.

But there's not enough interest among those who write malware or hack other people's systems to make every piece of software or hardware a target.

If no one is interested in your thing, no one is going to try to ruin it. Of course, no one will want to buy it either, but that's a different problem.

So you have to figure that – except for systems with broad commercial appeal, and therefore tremendous potential for profitable criminal abuse – anyone writing malware for a specific system is going to be someone interested in that system and/or the people that use it, right?

Yes. Which is why it is more surprising to hear that someone bothered to create malware designed to attack Microsoft's Xbox Kinect motion-sensing game controller than it is to hear that the researcher who did it is 15 years old.

Security researcher Shantanu Gawde, who works for a company called MalCon Research built an app called "gawde" that runs on a Windows 7 computer and collects sensory data from the Kinect. Keyed partially by voice recognition and a list of key words, the app takes pictures of the victim and the Kinect's surroundings and uploads them to a Picasa account.

The Kinect hack was part of a contest for the upcoming International Malware Contest in Mumbai, India, where it will be demonstrated.

If you don't go, or don't get the patch, just be sure to turn your Kinect to the wall when you're not using it. No need to make it even more likely someone will be able to spy on you while you're gaming or watching HBO in your jammies.